SymbioticCities 2014 International Design Ideas Competition

PRIZE WINNER:

Designing for a symbiotic, regenerative relationship with our environment...

The Symbiotic Cities Network is an open network of urban planners, architects, engineers, ecologists and economists exploring how the design of our cities could shift our relationship with the environment from being pathologically parasitic to being Ecologically beneficial. See more...

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Symbiotic Cities Blog

June 2014

The 2014 SymbioticCities International Design Ideas Competition: “Urban Transformations: Designing the Symbiotic City” launched on the first day of summer June 21st. If you are a planner, urban designer, architect, landscape architect, engineer, or ecologist, we think you may have some important insights to share with the world about how to transform our existing cities into more resilient, climate adaptive, regenerative, symbiotic cities. We have designed this international design ideas competition for you to explore and show the world your ideas.

The 2014 SymbioticCities International Design Ideas Competition: “Urban Transformations: Designing the Symbiotic City” launched on the first day of summer June 21st, and is open for submissions until the first day of fall, Sept 21st. If you are a planner, urban designer, architect, landscape architect, engineer, or ecologist, we think you may have some important insights to share with the world about how to transform our existing cities into more resilient, climate adaptive, regenerative, symbiotic cities. We have designed this international design ideas competition for you to show the world your ideas.

An international jury of planning and design experts will select the winning entry to be announced on October 21st, 2014. DIALOG, this year’s competition sponsor, has generously sponsored a grand prize of $1,000 CDN. We have developed the SymbioticCities International Design Ideas Competition with three purposes in mind:

First: To generate critical thinking and discussion about the problems facing cities in a climate-changing world, and the changes required to transform the built environment to meet these challenges.

Second: To challenge participants to develop creative and inspiring planning and design concepts that will help our species move in the direction of a more symbiotic relationship with our planet’s natural systems.

Third: To connect like-minded individuals around the world who are passionate about postively transforming cities, and provide a platform for them to explore how they might transform their own cities into regenerative symbiotic cities.

We would like participants to explore and develop planning and design concepts, for transforming the city that you live in into a regenerative symbiotic city adapted to a climate-changing environment, using some combination of diagrams, sketches, 2D and 3D drawings, and accompanied by an explanatory narrative. We are looking for design concepts to explore how to address key environmental problems now associated with your city, and transform now ecologically destructive urban systems into regenerative, symbiotic systems.

We have brought together a very thoughtful and insightful jury of distinguished planners, urban designers, architects, landscape architects, and engineers to review and select a winning competiion entry. Jury member include:

Rahul Mehrotra, Director of Planning and Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Boston Massachusetts

January 2014

How will we transform our cities to shift us from our current parasitically harmful relationship with our natural environment to a regenerative, symbiotic relationship? This was one of the first questions that we asked after developing the definition of a Regenerative Symbiotic City. This blog outlines the key transformations required to achieve symbiosis.

How will we transform our cities to shift us from our current parasitically harmful relationship with our natural environment to a regenerative, symbiotic relationship?

This was one of the first questions that we asked after developing the definition of a Regenerative Symbiotic City. In answering this question, we agreed that such transformations would need to be ones that underpinned the basic needs of human habitation - shelter, food, energy, access to resources, mobility, and ecosystems services - while at the same time positively contributing to the health and regeneration of local and regional ecosystems. We also agreed that these transformations would need to be grounded in cold hard reality, can only be implemented if existing political and economic resources were effectively marshaled, and would need to be both "economically rational” and be implementable within a time frame that would allow them to begin to have real impact within the next few decades.

Most importantly, we think that these transformations must be rational and practical extensions of existing science and technologies, and not reliant on yet-to-be-invented solutions. For example, shifting from gasoline powered to electric powered cars would be entirely feasible within our current transportation systems; or shifting from fossile fuel energy to renewable energies and thorium nuclear energy is now technically and economically feasible, even though these technologies face huge implementation hurdles.

What are these transformations?

In the Transformations section of the SymbioticCities.net website we have focused on what we are 10 of the most important transformations required to facilitate the transformation of our cites from parasitic to symbiotic cities. They are:

1. Transforming from a carbon intensive economy to a net-zero carbon energy economy;

2. Developing ecosystem services infrastructure to support the generation of ecosystem services;

When I am giving public presentations about Symbiotic Cities I am often asked about the assumptions we have made in developing the ideas that are set out in this website. This is a very important question, because, clearly, the assumptions we have made will determine both the reasonableness and the potential for implementation of the ideas. We have clearly set out these assumptions in the introduction to the Transitions section of the site, but they bear repeating again in response to our readers queries.

When I am giving public presentations about Symbiotic Cities I am often asked about the assumptions we have made in developing the ideas that are set out in this website. This is a very important question, because, clearly, the assumptions we have made will determine both the reasonableness and the potential for implementation of the ideas. We have clearly set out these assumptions in the introduction to the Transitions section of the site, but they bear repeating again in response to our readers queries. There are four key assumptions as follows:

1. History is not pre-determined: Our civiliztion is not necessarily locked into doing things the way we are doing them now, nor into how we have done things in the past. If we were, then there would indeed be no hope and no viable future! We do not believe in a pre-determined, Hegelian path for history, and do not think that societies and civiliztions move in pre-determined cycles, rising and then falling in some regular fashion. Instead, we think that, as Niall Ferguson notes in his book Civiliztion - The West and the Rest, civilizations "...operate somewhere between oder and disorder - on the 'edge of chaos' in the phrase of computer scientist Chritopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time, apparrently in equilibrium, in reality constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when they 'go critical'. A slight perturbation can set off a 'phase transition' from a benign equilibrium to a crisis..."[page 299-230] It is therefore our job as a species to find a more successful course for our future, and the means of implementing it.

2. Our problems are not caused by "others": We do not believe that our poblems are caused by "others" (other races, other cultures, other nations, other political parties). Although it is often easy to blame others for our problems, in reality, we think that the most difficult problems we face are the result of our deep-seated human nature that manifests itself in both positive and negative ways. Moreover, we think that the above described transformations can only be successful if we find ways to implement them that take into account the realities of our human nature. The implementation of these transformations, then, must appear "reasonable" from a great many perspectives - which will indeed be one of the great challenges facing us in implementing these transformations.

3. The symbiotic transformations must be rational and based on facts and sound science: We think that, even though the transformations must be understood as relevant in many cultural contexts, they must nevertheless be entirely rational, logical and based on sound science. We are entering an era where our species' future success will very much depend on our ability to use our now vast understanding of the natural and physical world in creative and effective ways, but also an era that will, by the very nature of some of the future shocks and stresses we face, make it much more difficult to escape the counter-productive behaviours associated with the irrational side of human nature that is much amplified during times of stress.

4. The symbiotic transformations must be individually effective AND mutually supportive and reinforcing: We think that in order to be implemented, these transformations must be effective in and of themselves, and not require other tranformations to be implemented as precursors. It should be noted here, however, the implementation of multiple transformations will have synergies and positive feedbacks that individual transformatiosn may not have on their own.

December 2013

We are very interested in exploring the question of how to implement significant and complex social and economic change – for example the kind of economic and social change that will be required to address global warming, and would like to hear back from you, your thoughts on this question. Who are the key writers that are exploring this at the moment? What past precedents are worth examining?

We are very interested in exploring the question of how to implement significant and complex social and economic change -- for example the kind of significant change that will be required to address global warming -- and would like to hear your thoughts on this question. What is your response to this question? Who are the key writers that are exploring this at the moment? What past precedents are worth examining?

As we have been fleshing out the Transition sections of this website, one of the perennial questions we have been faced with is: “Even if we can develop practical and implementable solutions to significant problems like climate change, and various forms of environmental degradation, all of our economic and social systems are solidly locked into their current modes by a economic and social inertia that strongly resists these solutions. So how do we overcome this inertia in a democratic society?” If you have any thoughts and suggestions, we would greatly appreciate hearing your thoughts on this.

Please make your suggestions as comments to this blog, or send us a contact message.

In this blog, Dale discuses the effects that forest harvesting has upon soil nutrients like carbon and nitrogen with the goal of developing forestry practices that can continue to provide ecosystem services that sustain ecological communities, contribute to climate change mitigation and support rural economies in Canada.

Dale researches the effect that forest harvesting can have upon soil nutrients like carbon and nitrogen with the goal of developing forestry practices that can continue to provide ecosystem services that sustain ecological communities, contribute to climate change mitigation and support rural economies throughout the county. The red spruce tree (pictured above) that Dale harvested was turned into an 8”x10” timber post that forms one corner of his home in Mooseland, NS. Dale is the sixth generation to work on his family owned woodlots in NS: the first private lands in the province to be certified to the stringent environmental standard of the Forest Stewardship Council®.

By Craig Applegath

When did you first become interested in the possibility of deploying sustainably managed forests as large scale carbon sinks?

I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t interested in forest ecology and ecosystem-based forest management. I’ve also always been aware that those managing their forests to provide habitat for wildlife, recreational and spiritual values that society appreciates were at an economic disadvantage because they were forced to compete against landowners and managers that only care about maximizing their quarterly returns. When the significance of increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations really started to hit home, it seemed that creating an economic incentive for landowners and managers to manage their forests for carbon storage was a win-win for all: for the forests, responsible landowners and for a world trying to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Wasn’t former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien roundly criticized for suggesting something similar at the Kyoto Climate Talks in 1997? What has changed in thinking since then?

20 years is what has changed. We thought we had more time to deal with this problem than we did. Now we realize that we need short, medium and long term solutions, all of which need to be rolled out simultaneously. Managing forests for carbon storage is something we can start right away: it requires no technological advances, no new CO2 pipelines, no CCS plants. We’re talking about solar powered carbon capture and storage that we can start doing today.

And you? Do you think sustainably managed forests can be effectively leveraged to help realize the goal of significantly reducing atmospheric carbon concentrations?

Unequivocally, Yes. Modeling suggests that managing forest land for carbon storage is capable of significantly reducing temperatures over the coming century. It’s a key part of the solution as a short to medium term greenhouse gas mitigation strategy that will help us buy time while we bring on the structural changes that will completely eliminate dangerous emissions of all sorts. At the same time we improve our forest ecosystems, the resiliency of forest dependent rural communities, freshwater habitats, and allow civilization to reconnect with the awe of the natural wealth that our forests hold.

Most people in the forestry industry believe that their model of clearcutting and replanting is the best way to sequester and store carbon in forests. Your research indicates just the opposite, and you have found that clear-cutting actually releases ground-stored carbon into the atmosphere. Can you tell us briefly in layman’s language what you have found?

The majority of carbon in a forest is stored below ground in the soil as organic matter. Work out of Dr. Lisa Kellman’s lab (of which I’m a part) at St. Francis Xavier University is showing that clearcutting seems to mobilize this massive carbon sink, causing the emission of potentially tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide on each square kilometer of forest land clearcut. Many in the forestry industry have suggested that they sequester and store carbon in fast growing plantations. However none of them have accounted for what happens below ground in the soil, which contains more than two times as much carbon as exists in all of the live trees combined. My research suggests that, for up to 35 years following clearcutting, forest soils are a source of carbon dioxide, cancelling out any sequestration benefit from a regrowing forest.

Counter-intuitively this represents a huge opportunity: in Canada we have clearcut vast tracks of forest multiple times, reducing the carbon stored in these soils. With careful management we can put that carbon back, turning these carbon depleted soils into massive carbon sinks. This could have an enormously positive impact on global efforts to contain and reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.

Symbiotic Cities would arguably need to rely heavily on both rural and urban forests to maintain a supply of environmental services. Do you see any possibilities for existing suburbs to begin to substantially increase their forest cover, for example, by replacing turf-grass with indigenous forest trees and shrubs? Will it be possible to transform the eco-biology of the suburbs without evicting all of its inhabitants?

There are lots of opportunities for sub-urban environments to augment and improve the health of ecosystems within their communities. Making use of local species of grasses, shrubs and trees not only stores more carbon than do traditionally used species, but also improves wildlife habitat for local insects, birds and small mammals, improves water services like storage and filtration, and gives us the opportunity to help species migrate as the climate changes. What’s needed is a shift in aesthetic preference from homogenous, simple systems dominated by a few introduced species to an appreciation for local, diverse habitats that are based on healthy ecosystems.

I have a friend that grew up in a suburb in southern California. The city planted avocados in street mediums and along sidewalks. No one was for want of fresh avocados, even those with little disposable income. I think of this often when speaking of landscaping in suburbs.

Can urban forests play a role in carbon sequestration?

Absolutely. Urban forests have a unique potential to serve immense value as recreational, educational and spiritual refuges in the everyday lives of millions. This public exposure ought to be leveraged to educate urban populations of the importance of forest ecosystems and on the value of forests as carbon sinks. Urban forests may not store as much carbon directly as their rural counterparts, but can be used to put forest carbon storage on the radar of the 80% of the population of Canada that lives in cities, thereby moving carbon storage up on the list of importance for forest owners and managers.

With all the bad environmental news you read, do you have any good news for us?

Despite the antediluvian actions of the Federal Government, individuals and corporations across the country are voluntarily taking responsibility for their own greenhouse gas emissions. CIBC World Markets expects China to put a national price on carbon by 2016. In my home province of Nova Scotia, we’ve reduced our use of coal by 38% in recent years primarily by bringing online wind energy. Technological advancements are getting closer and closer to eliminating altogether the need for fossil fuels. Change is not linear, and I think that we’re beginning to see that it’s actually exponential.

Thanks Dale!

More About Dale Prest:

Dale’s passion is understanding the relationship between forest management and the health of society. Dale is currently researching the long-term impacts of clearcut harvesting on forest soil carbon storage in the Acadian Forest and works with Community Forests International exploring the value of ecosystem services that sustainably managed forests return to society. We think Dale’s work is key to developing a better understanding of both how to sequester carbon in sustainably managed forests, as well as how to better understand sustainable forest management in the context of the ecosystem services production. Dale currently lives in Mooseland, NS, near where he grew up logging family owned sustainable woodlots.